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Part 4
The police tape across the entrance to the abandoned Bronze lay limply on the ground, the crime-scene seal broken. And the Sunnydale Police Department, true to its reputation in the annals of Slayer lore, had managed to be blissfully unaware and unconcerned. Elisa looked closely at the police tape. Nope, wasn’t even imbedded with the microfilaments that had been in common use for over a decade. Break one of those seals and you lit up the tactical board at the local PD.She wasn’t an engineer, or a detective or a Slayer, but you couldn’t grow up around the DH Group and its activities and personnel without learning more than you ever wanted to know about security.
The door opened from the bright light of Southern California day to the cavernous darkness of the boarded-up club.
She took a deep breath and stepped inside. Despite her night blindness from the sun, she could make out an individual sitting at a table near the bar, a few narrow bars of light from a poorly covered window falling across his face and on the bottle of whiskey he was pouring into a glass.
Harris.
“Buffy?” he asked blearily, blinking past the whiskey haze.
“Right chateau, wrong vintage,” said Elisa.
“You’re …”
“Elisa Summers. The girl whose father you recently tried to kill. I’d like to say it’s a pleasure, but who are we kidding?”
“You look so much like her.”
“Save it,” she said.
“How’s Willow?”
“Her condition’s been upgraded. She should be okay, but I’d get out of Dodge if I were you. Oz seems to be holding a minor grudge at the moment. Or are you just going to shoot him, too?”
“It wasn’t supposed to go down like that. I would never … not her. Never her.”
“Right, we wouldn’t want anybody to get hurt while we’re committing Murder One. So, you’re what all the fuss has been about, huh? Can’t say I’m impressed, but somehow my mother thought enough of you to have been your friend once, so I’m going to give you one shot to convince me that you’re a salvageable human being.”
“He killed my wife.”
“Don’t feed me that line, Harris. I know the story. Mom killed the sire of the thing that murdered your wife twenty years ago. Your wife’s been avenged for a long time. Move on.”
“I can’t,” he said, looking into the amber depths of his drink.
“Then we have a problem.”
He glanced up at her. “What are you going to do, kill me? If that’s what you’re here for, just get it over with and spare me the Daddy-dearest speech.”
“Do I look like a soldier of fortune to you? I came here to show you something, not kill you. I’ve got friends who’ll do that without me having to bother with it.”
She placed a personal data pad on the table in front of him and switched it on. After a brief self-diagnostic, the operating system’s splash screen came up.
“Run ‘video one’,” she said.
The computer accessed its storage and almost immediately the screen changed to show her mother sitting on a white couch in front of a large bay window. Snowy woods were visible beyond the window, and flames danced in the fireplace on one side of the room.
Elisa moved off to stand a few feet away by the bar. She’d seen the video many, many times before, and it was etched into her memory. As the audio track began, she could see the whole thing in her mind without having to watch the screen. She closed her eyes and could see her mother, looking happy and sad and reflective all at once, a woman who had known precious little peace in her life trying to bridge an unbridgeable gap between her and the daughter she was doomed never to really know.
“I hope you never see this, Elisa, but if you do it’s because my life finally caught up with me and I’m not there to tell you these things in person. I’m sorry. You deserve so much more from me than this, but it’s too late for that now.
“I’m not here to talk about me and who I was. Your father and Willow can do that, probably better than I ever could. They always knew me even better than I knew myself. No, I want to tell you about some of the people in your life, people who over the years came to mean a very great deal to me, and who I very much hope will come to mean every bit as much to you.
“Let me start with the best friend anyone in this world ever had. Willow is … well, what can I say about her? We’ve had our ups and downs, and I’ve sometimes forgotten what she means to me — it’s easy to do that with those who are closest and most important to us. We start taking them for granted, believe they’ll always be there no matter what we do. Don’t you take her for granted. You couldn’t ask for a better example of courage and spirit. Get to know her, Elisa, because she and your father are so much a part of who I was that to know them is to know me. I can’t be there for you, but as long as she is, I know you can’t go too far wrong in this life.
“Then there’s Giles. I hope he’s still around by the time you see this, because it would be a great shame if you never got to know this remarkable figure in my life. Giles may seem out of touch at times — heck, I’m sure if I were there, I’d look out of touch to you, too — but I’d listen to him if I were you. There are precious few people in this world who I know without a doubt would die to protect you from harm, but he’s one of them. In a very real way, I already owe Rupert Giles your life. I never would have lived long enough to bring you into this world if it weren’t for his guidance and concern. He really is the best, and I love him dearly.
“Which brings me to the third great pillar of my life, your father. How can I possibly begin to tell you about what he is to me, and what I hope he will be for you? The two of us have literally been to hell and back together. Our love has weathered tempests that no mere biochemical attraction could ever survive. It’s never really been easy, what he and I have together, but it’s always been worth all the sacrifices and hard times.”
Without looking at the screen, Elisa could see her mother’s eyes light with emotion as she continued.
“There’s something far more than just chemistry between us, something magnificent and transcendent and terrifying all at once. Terrifying because like fire, our love can so easily rage uncontrolled, destructive and primal. It has before. You’ll hear things from others about your father during your life. The only person you should ever believe is Willow. She knows the whole sad, wonderful, terrible, exultant story. All I will tell you is that your father is, along with you, the most cherished part of my existence, a man of faultless loyalty and an innate decency that even the forces of hell itself never did manage to eradicate forever. His dark past is not his, Elisa. As my dear friend and mentor Giles once said, the face may be the same, but the heart is different. But more than that, the mind and soul are different too, as different as the contrast between a nightmare and dream.”
She paused for a long moment, biting her lower lip and looking off into the space above the camera. Finally, she returned her level, emerald gaze and said, “There is one more person you should know about, just in case. A very long time ago, there was a man named Alexander Harris, and he and Willow and I were inseparable. The Three Musketeers of Slaying. But time and tide drifted our ships apart over the years, and I don’t know if you will ever see him.
“If you do meet him one day, I hope you meet the Xander I came to know as my friend, and not the demon-haunted man I turned him into.”
Her expression turned subdued and contemplative. “Xander is one of those regrets in life we never can quite forget, an old sadness that comes at odd moments, whether in the quiet of night, or while listening to one of your father’s blues albums, or sometimes even during the bright light of day amid a whirl of activity. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never regretted knowing him. But I very much do regret that I never saw what my life was doing to him until it was too late. Life is funny that way, Elisa. It likes to let us know all about our past mistakes while letting us stumble blindly into those of the present.
“I dearly hope that one day he will reconcile with your dad. It may never be possible. Sometimes our emotions resist all our best efforts to tame them. Heaven knows, it was always that way for me and Angel. Whatever our feelings for one another, ‘controlled’ was never an adjective that applied. And it’s not one that ever applied to your father and Xander, either.”
She sighed. “Despite everything, I know that Xander is basically a good man. He risked his life time and time again to save me and Willow and others, and a bad person wouldn’t have done that. But the fact remains that I did change him, took a naïve and goodhearted man and through neglect and shortsightedness helped resentment and bitterness take hold of his life. They say time heals all wounds. I don’t know if that’s true. But if you ever meet my good friend, my old friend Xander, tell him that I’m sorry. Tell him I never wanted to hurt him, that I had no right to take his life and lay waste to it. And if he finally understands that, you might one day see the man I called friend, who breathed life into me as I lay dead, who was braver than he ever believed he was and better than he ever allowed himself to be.
“Right now, you may not understand what I’m trying to tell you with all this talk of Giles and Willow, your dad and Xander, but you will one day. Ultimately, it’s one of the most important things I have to give you. It’s a lesson I learned too late — that friends change our lives, and by the same token we change theirs. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. But always forever. When you toss a stone into a still lake, on some level you’ve changed it for all time. It’s the same with people.”
She paused again, then shrugged and said, “Well, that’s about it, kiddo. Know me through the people I knew. Realize that there’s nothing I wouldn’t give to be there with you right now. And above all live, really live your life. Because most of us only get one shot at it, and we’d better make it count. There’s no time for bitterness or resentment or anger. No time at all. You’ll turn out great, Elisa. I know that because I know the people who will be there for you when I couldn’t be. ’Bye now, Elisa. I love you.”
Elisa opened her eyes in time to see the screen grow dark, and Xander staring at it silently, then she said, “She always blamed herself, you son of a bitch. Until the end, she blamed herself for what you became. Well, I’m not as charitable as my mother was, Harris. I don’t like you, and I resent you coming into my life and tearing it apart. What the hell gives you the right? What the hell makes you think that just because you’ve been hurt you have the right to destroy everyone else? My father has had to live with the guilt of a past he never had any control over. Before you pick up where you left off, you’d better think about living with the guilt of a present you do have control over.”
He said nothing for awhile as he nursed his drink and stared off into the shadows of the Bronze.
Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “What happened to her? I never knew the whole story.”
Maybe I’m getting through to him after all, thought Elisa as she sat down across from him again. She took a deep breath and began to tell the story, one she knew by heart, one that had over the years become part of DH Group legend as much as it was personal family history.
“You fought the M-7s yourself, so you know that fifteen years ago, things were looking grim. We didn’t know yet how to block the Morphology-Seven genetic pathogen, and the Goal Line orbital minefield was still on the drawing board. Mom decided she couldn’t lead from the DH Group ops center, that the experiences she still retained from the former Dark Hunter hosts was needed in the field. So she started leading Dark Angel missions again. That’s when she recorded this video for me, among others.
“Fortunately for all of us, the tide began to turn with the development of the counteragent to M-7 and Morphologies Eight through Fourteen. For the first time, we were able to halt and even regress the progress of the genetic resequencing in affected hosts. The M-7 aliens realized the potential of this, that if we were able to develop these counteragents into a contagion, not only would we wipe them off the face of this planet, but if any got back to other colonized worlds it would be a disaster for them. So they launched a major offensive …”
“The Goal Line Stand offensive,” said Xander.
“Right. Their expeditionary force walked straight into Goal Line and got taken apart by the orbital warheads and nuke-pumped X-ray lasers. We were winning. Cut off from reinforcement and unable to count on the M-7 pathogen, they were being destroyed in detail.
“But they weren’t down for the count. The DH Group learned that they were trying to make an end run around Goal Line with the development of a stable wormhole gate right here on Earth. It was feasible. They had the technology — it’s not much different from some of the magical artifacts that were in existence prior to the Gehenna Key battle.
“The Group managed to locate the M-7s’ lab, underground in the mountains of North Carolina. A conventional air strike wouldn’t have dented it, and no one was ever going to release nuclear authority for use on American soil. So Mom took two Dark Angel strike teams in to lay C-4 and destroy the wormhole gate.
“As near as anyone’s been able to reconstruct from the surviving Dark Angels’ networked Tactical Data Recorders, they got the charges emplaced, started the timers, and then Alpha Squad found itself cut off along its line of retreat.
“They got pinned down in the lab, and it appears that with time running out on the charges, Mom ordered the squad through the gate, which was idling in test mode at the time. We don’t know what happened to them after that. The place came down and there wasn’t anything left of the gate’s telemetry equipment to reconstruct the dynamics of the Crossover Event. But Zoot Kerschel, DH’s resident super genius, doesn’t give them much chance. Most likely they were torn apart by gravitational tidal forces or emerged from the wormhole into Null Space. Dad never accepted it, but in all likelihood, none of them survived.”
Xander shook his head. “Don’t you ever count her out, kid. Your mom’s the toughest person I ever knew in my whole life. If there was any way at all, I’d put money on her having found it.”
“You really loved her, didn’t you?”
He shrugged. “Thought I did, once. What the hell did I know? I was sixteen years old. I thought I loved Cordelia and Willow, too. Maybe in a way, I still do. All three of them. But Buffy … I don’t know. You ever have this overwhelming compulsion to keep doing something you know is crazy and dangerous and will probably get you killed? That’s what being a part of her life was like, and you get addicted to that, to the adrenaline rush, to the high you feel when you just barely escape death and know you’re still alive. So maybe it was love, but it was mixed in with a lot of other weird stuff you probably wouldn’t understand.”
“I understand jealousy,” she said.
“So, that’s what you think it all comes down to with me and Angel, huh?”
“I think that’s where it started.”
“You didn’t know him, what he was like. If you had, you would understand.”
“Well, I don’t understand. What I do understand is that Mom forgave him and fell in love with him. I understand that Willow forgave him and has been his friend for two decades now. I understand that even Giles forgave him, and he had every right to hold a grudge. So guess what? You’re odd man out. You’re the one who’s got the problem, who can’t get past it. You’re the one who can’t tell my father from the monster my mother killed. I don’t know why that is, unless it all comes down to the fact that you can’t stand it that she chose him over you.”
Xander looked down at the table and said, “Maybe. Problem is, even I don’t know the answer anymore.”
“Elisa, come here,” came her father’s voice from the door. He said it quietly, not with anger but with fear shimmering beneath the surface.
No, not now! Not when I’m just getting through to this shmuck, she thought.
“Dad, wait …”
“Now, hon.”
“Go ahead,” said Xander flatly. He glanced coldly past her to her father framed in the doorway and took another slug from the glass.
She shook her head, feeling a profound dread, then picked up her data pad and left the table.
“You can wait outside. Don’t worry,” said her father.
She nodded and started past him, and he rested his hand on her shoulder. “I love you, but you’ve got more courage than common sense sometimes, Elisa.”
“When Mom was my age, she was saving the world. I’m not a child,” she said.
He looked at her, looked into her with those dark and familiar eyes that always seemed to hold so much sadness within them.
“When your mom was your age, she’d already experienced more pain and regret than anyone should have to face in an entire lifetime,” he said quietly. “I don’t want that kind of life for you.”
She swallowed hard and left the Bronze behind her.